Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons died on Saturday after an illness, aged 82. The legendary empire builder and corporate raider was worth $10 billion at Forbes last reckoning, ranking 40 on the 2013 Forbes 400. He died at the Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, having been in failing health for several months.

Simmons, who built his fortune from nothing, was known to wear $3,000 sport coats to reflect his wealth, but underwear from Wal-Mart out of respect for his frugal upbringing.

He'll be remembered mostly for three things. First, for his investments in old-line "dirty" industrial conglomerates and a Texas nuclear waste dump.

Second, his deep philanthropy -- he gave a reported $500 million to charity, including $175 million to UT Southwestern to establish the The Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and $50 million to Dallas' Parkland Hospital. He was known for regularly passing out hundred dollar bills to panhandlers.

Third, his massive funding of Republican politicians, including $4 million towards the "Swift Boat" attacks on Sen. John Kerry and $30 million to Super PACs in the 2012 election cycle.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he called Barack Obama "the most dangerous man in America" because he wanted to "eliminate free enterprise in this country."

He'll be missed by pals like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, as well as T. Boone Pickens, who in a statement today said:

“Harold Simmons was one of my best friends, and it’s never easy to say goodbye to close friends. Harold accomplished so much in his life. He was a passionate person — passionate about his family, his business, philanthropy and politics. We worked together on a lot of different projects. He was one of the most successful and focused men I’ve ever known. We should all leave such a rich legacy behind. My thoughts and prayers go out to Annette and all of Harold’s many family members and friends.”

Born 1931 in Golden, Texas to schoolteacher parents, Simmons spent his early years without indoor plumbing or electricity. But went to the University of Texas and became a bank examiner.

He began his empire building in 1960. With $5,000 worth of savings and a $95,000 loan, he bought a pharmacy. By 1973 he had built up a chain of 100 stores, which he sold to Eckerd for more than $50 million.

He put that cash to work buying shares in cheap public companies like Amalgamated Sugar, relying heavily on debt to maximize his bets. He liked to target companies with overfunded pension plans -- which Simmons saw as pools of underutilized capital that could be put to better use if invested in shares of other takeover targets.

In time he built up, under his Contran holding company, a collection of cash cow industrial companies. These included NL Industries (formerly National Lead), Titanium Metals (which he sold a year ago, pocketing $1 billion), Kronos Worldwide and Keystone Consolidated Industries (which he recently took private).

He was sued left and right for contamination resulting from the operations of his National Lead company -- numerous NL sites made it to the EPA's Superfund list.

Showing an omnipresent eagerness to invest in the dirtiest of industries, in recent years one of his primary foci had been Waste Control Specialists, which successfully beat back opposition from environmentalists to open a low-level radioactive waste dump in Andrews, Texas, near the New Mexico border. So far thousands of tons of waste have been buried there.

Ironic, for a guy who made money on companies that created so many Superfund sites, Waste Control Specialists has profited from helping to clean them up -- burying hundreds of thousands of tons of PCB-laden sludge from G.E.'s operations along the Hudson River.

A classic libertarian, Simmons didn't think there should be any restrictions on political donations. And he didn't care much about the far right-wing's Pro-Life or anti-gay tendencies. In 2011 his foundation gave $600,000 to Planned Parenthood and another $600,000 to a group called the Resource Center, which helps the gay and HIV-positive community.